kick a little something for the G’s
WELL WHAT DO YOU KNOW
Hello hello twenty fourteen. In twenty thirteen we had new kitchen, new job, new (or at least refurbished) intestines. This year I am looking for a little stability. There is stuff I’d like to do and places I’d like to go, but overall the song could remain the same and I would happily hum along.
We had great holidays, drinking wine and eating smoked salmon* and getting sweaty with Just Dance 2014. (I OWN the high score to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” by the way. This makes Nora extremely frustrated, but oh well kid. Mom’s got skillz.) It was a pretty hockey-intensive Christmas for the Nora, with the big gift being a new stick and the most useful gift being an odor-eater designed especially to toss inside hockey gear bags. Because holy hell, the funk of those shin guards after practice. Unbelievable.
*I do not think I ever had smoked salmon in the house before I purchased it to make a particular holiday appetizer, and Mr. Rocko Cat went INSANE with lust the minute the package was opened, yowling and sniffing and trying to climb up on the counter. How did he not know about this food? It is both of his favorite things: bacon and fish! Fishbacon! He got a tiny scrap on Christmas Day and then licked the plate for ten full minutes. Fishbacon fishbacon fishbacon.
I HESITATED TO TELL THIS STORY, BECAUSE I WORRIED THAT IT WOULD SEEM SAPPY OR (WORSE) SELF-AGGRANDIZING, BUT I DON’T MEAN IT TO BE EITHER OF THOSE THINGS, AND EVENTUALLY I SAID FUCK IT
Nora and I like to watch Chopped. Her television choices are invariably factual, she has no time for animation or stories anymore. She watches survival stuff (Bear Grylls, etc) with either one of us, How It’s Made with LT (for I do not giveth one single fuck how it’s made), and competitive cooking shows with me.
She is getting to an age where I more freely share my opinions on social issues and such. I try to leave her lots of room to form her own opinions, but if something seems particularly awesome or particularly wrongheaded I will say so. Chopped offers a lot of opportunities to have such discussions, because a not-very-surprising number of chefs have struggled with things like addictions and homelessness and sexism in professional kitchens, and there are talking-head segments in between the cooking parts that go into that sort of biographical detail.
On this episode one of the contestants was a Korean-American female chef from New York, and she said something about how winning would help her prove to herself that she had made good decisions in her life and career, and further went on to say that she had been adopted as a baby and never really felt at home in her family, and that they were now fairly estranged.
I thought that was pretty damn sad, and I said so. I said that everyone deserves to feel like part of a family, and that I wish that chef and her parents could have had a better relationship, both when she was little and now. Nora was uncharacteristically quiet while I said this stuff, but she snuggled closer to me on the couch.
Later that same chef revealed that one reason she doesn’t talk to her parents is that she was a difficult teenager, with lots of acting out and minor criminal behaviors, and eventually they sent her to a reform school/boot camp place. This is one of my hot-button issues and it caused me to go on a mini-rant. I am sure it is horrendously difficult to live with a family member who is experiencing psychic distress and causing upheaval for everyone else, but for fuck’s sake, the answer is not to GET RID OF THAT PERSON. Oh sure, let me hand my emotionally-wounded child over to nonprofessional, barely trained thugs in an unregulated environment. That is sure to go well.
Yeah, yeah, it’s easy for me to say, since I haven’t been there. But. There are ways to provide structure, boundaries, and compassion all at the same time, and I have no sympathy for parents who throw up their hands and decide to outsource all of that.
Anyway, I said a much shorter and more age-appropriate version of this to Nora, in response to the Chopped contestant’s sad story, although I did not skimp on the moral outrage and unfairness of it all.
We continued to watch the show in silence for a little longer, and suddenly she said, “I love you, Mom.” Which is not something she spontaneously says very often (outside of ritual leave-takings and bedtimes). It was an odd, but extremely sweet, moment. Nora, I will fail you in lots of ways, but I will not kick an underage you out of my life for being difficult. That’s a promise.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I WILL KICK THIS PLANT ESSENCE RIGHT TO THE CURB
(The medically sensitive should go read something more pleasant right about now)
Okay, so I had an ingrown hair on…an area. I was not really sure what to do about it. Asking the internet resulted in some barbaric ideas like digging around in there with sharp tweezers (no…not…in the area). Other people suggested tea tree oil. We actually have tea tree oil in the house, LT bought it and must use it in some secret bathroom skincare capacity that I have never directly witnessed. I dabbed some on the ingrown-hair spot for a few days in a row and it did seem to be drying up the bump pretty well.
Then one night I applied some tea tree oil before going to bed, and I guess in my sleep I must have scratched off the scab and the tea tree oil ended up directly in the wound, and do you know what that feels like? To be woken up out of a dead sleep with the sting of hippie fucking caustic plant oil on an area? To be in the bathroom at 3 am blearily applying a cold compress to an area, and not for any fun aftermath-of-sexual-gymnastics reasons? Blah.
—mimi smartypants is way over her word limit.